war

Here is Open Oceans. I wrote this tune in about 2008 or so on an acoustic guitar. It’s the first time I tried writing with a guitar and playing and singing simultaneously. I ended up playing the repetitive acoustic guitar on the actual record. There’s another couple of electric parts that I added, and then more electric parts by my friend Paul Lafourest. He also played the bass on this. My buddy Nathan Menhorn is the drummer.

The lone female vocal is Jenny Malin, who is now passed away 🙁 There’s also Paul on backing vocals, and our friend Lacey on extra female vocals. There’s a lot of density in the song, but it can be done pretty pared down.

This song is about stop loss. The woman character is waiting for the soldier to come home, but stop loss has him staying longer. Stop loss is when the military disallows scheduled retirement or return from duty in order to keep soldiers in the field. In the end, he’ll be coming back, but with PTSD.

What can you even say about PTSD? I will say this – a LOT of people have a little bit of PTSD, and it can come from the obvious stuff like going to war, or being a cop, or living in a really rough neighborhood, or being physically abused as a child, but it can also come from other places, like trauma surrounding your health, or psychological abuse that can come from a lot of places. What PTSD does is it makes you react to every conflict as if it were life and death, and this makes it very very hard to communicate.

The good news is, it’s a problem that can be solved (usually). To that end, I’ll be donating 15% of revenue from this song and video to a worthy cause that helps do this. I’m not allowed to say which charity, but it’s good, and I spent a goodly amount of time researching who was really doing good work for that cause. So, to help with that, you can GET YOUR DOWNLOAD OF THE TRACK HERE.

The thing that I notice in these lyrics is that at the end I’m like “gonna need your love to remain revealed”…because that’s so important. The way to really start to get out of being conditioned to be violent is love. And man…I dunno what I can even say about it. Love, dude. Love.

Here are the lyrics to this tune, so you can see ’em and such:

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

been back deep in these open oceans
bad world tracks and these backward notions
everything they have in the world is not
enough to wanna shorten the time i got
even so i run with american forces
sand gun and tanks are replacing horses
and if you come back with enough you might
sleep a little better in your bed tonight

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

i been runnin from my bones for days
lookin for another way i can say this to ya
i ain’t never really comin home
they got another little trick
in they bag o stones
they call it stop loss
and it means i ain’t comin back
so make a little snack go to bed and relax
and i’ll give you a call when i’m over the wall
but we’re gonna have to run so fuck ’em all

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

there are too many ways i can die for you
there are too many days in my life for you
there are too many things I can do for you
what you do for me?
what you do for me?

she been spendin her days makin eyes for you
she been spendin her life waitin up for me
what you do for me?
what you do for me?
come on come on come on come on now

they got me built up past the brink
i’m nothin but a pile of muscle i’m about to sink
can’t float can’t swim can’t fly away
can’t get to the end of the fight today
i got a castle made of blood and my bones are mud
can’t bang my brain on the manly stud
they make me eat this food til i need to puke
gonna break this dude and i won’t rebuke
gonna slip away gonna come to you
but you gotta remember that i won’t be through
gonna need your light to remain revealed
gotta leave this war on the battlefield

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

love i’m waiting til the mornin light
just to see whether not you might
don’t make me have to tell you twice
i been leavin my light on night after night

And here’s the lyric video, so you can follow along:

So there you have it – Open Oceans. See ya soon!

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Really this kind of thing is my favorite. This one I thought up the chorus when I was out on the road with Poetry Alive. I remember being in this hotel thinking of that. I think it was actually the same day I wrote Walking Dead.

Then later on Eric came up with this guitar riff and we laid that down, and then we borrowed his dad’s drums and took ’em to my place, and he played the drums and the bass on this. Then I came up with the verses and sang all that weird stuff and he did some backup screeching.

I put distortion on the vocals to make it sound all gritty like a live performance and I spread the guitars out and all this stuff. I remember I had a mix done of this but when I took it to the mastering engineer (we actually had this record mastered by somebody real, John Greenham), he said there needed to be more low end, more kick. So I went back in and put on an extra kick drum sound that I played live to tape from a drum machine. I think I enhanced the mix a bit too.

Then gave it back.

This is pretty simple, this song. It’s about the war. “What are we fightin for?” – I mean that’s pretty much it. But there is some twist in the verse because I start talking to soldiers and one thing I say that I like and I think is a twist is: “and when it comes down to the last man, i hope to god in the heavens you know you can”

You can do it! You can! I dunno – I just like that sort of encouragement or reminding hey you can get through this, I hope you remember your inner competence, or something.

Anyway that’s about it, really, when it comes to anything to say about this tune. I like it cuz it’s just straight forward rock rap stuff. I’m such a big Rage fan that I don’t know why I don’t just do more of this.